The CSR Director’s Office as Insurgency HQ

To create value, social intelligence must be mobilized. Insurgent Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) directors do so by cultivating a network of internal allies — call them social intrapreneurs — that are motivated to insert social intelligence into their planning and decision-making activities. The CSR Director’s office becomes a resource and coordinating point for these independent actions. I want to reiterate that I am not suggesting that the CSR office operate in an insurrectionary way. To succeed, CSR managers must have buy-in at the top; most of their work is, in fact, translating leadership’s overall sustainability strategy into employee decision making.

Stakeholder engagement is a basic CSR function, and most sustainability directors are adept at mapping external constituencies and their interests. Sustainability insurgents leverage this skill, but turn it inward, using it to identify sponsors and allies within their company who understand the value of social intelligence. I have found that a simple Sustainability Behavioral Matrix, shown in Figure 1, is an effective way to organize the analysis.

Two measures are used to classify managers. The horizontal axis quantifies CSR Action: the degree to which someone is already integrating social intelligence into their decision making. The vertical axis, in contrast, quantifies CSR Awareness: a measure of how knowledgeable an employee is about CSR issues in general but also — perhaps more important — how in sync they are with the company’s overall CSR strategy and goals.

By dividing each axis in half, we identify four types of CSR behavior. The lower left is populated with the Skeptics: managers who do not believe in the value of CSR and take no action to support the company’s CSR effort. The upper left are the Slackers: managers who believe in the value of CSR, support the company’s strategy and goals, but for any number of reasons are not taking actions to incorporate social intelligence into their responsibilities. The lower right are the Sleepers: managers who actually take social intelligence into consideration, but who have not yet made the connection between their efforts and the company’s larger CSR strategy.